Topical items and views on the impact of digitisation on publishing and its content and the issues that make the news. This blog follows the report 'Brave New World',
(http://www.ewidgetsonline.com/vcil/bravenewworld.html ), published by the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland and authored by Martyn Daniels. The views and comments expressed are those of the author.

Monday, October 29, 2012

The planned merger of Penguin and Random House comes as no surprise
and if anything we expected to see a consolidation in the trade houses earlier
than this. The changing landscape of the market is such that only giants tend
to survive in markets that operate under cut throat discounting and radical digital
change. The question is how will the new giant reorganise itself to leverage
the economies of scale and scope on offer?

It matters little who owns what percentage, or even who sits
behind what desk, the challenge is to maximise those areas that add value and
consolidate those that do the same and incur waste. Much of the front office
should remain as it is today, but again there are areas of scope to remove duplication
and given their combined market share there is even more pressure to ensure
that they don’t try to outsmart each other. The back office would appear to
offer much more scope for reducing costs and streamlining global operations.

The fact that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation were reported
ready to crash the party and bid £1bn for Penguin this week, shows that all the
big six are cognisant of the need for consolidation and that one move such as
that taken by Random House and Penguin, could now lead to others very quickly.
HarperCollins and Macmillan would make obvious bedfellows, but would the merger
be merely restricted to trade or across both diverse businesses and could it also
benefit sectors such as education were some would suggest both lag behind the
pack. The music industry has show that, other than being niche and independent,
consolidation of the major players may be the only way to survive. But are we really
ready to go from six to three to two? Some may eye those just behind the top
tier but sometimes its as easy to swallow a big pill than a smaller one and it
often down to which gives the biggest payback.

If we step back and look at the other relationships affected, we
can envisage some mixed reactions. A top author in either house should expect
the prospect of more sales supported by larger marketing and promotion. Even
the smaller authors will probably be relieved if they are inside the new tent.
Those outside the new giant will have to fight even harder to be seen and read.
After all, market shares of 27% UK and 25% US, are not to be sniffed at. It
relates to 1 in 4 sales, which means 1 in 4 units and a quarter of shelf space.

The new organisation should be able to also commercially hit
harder against the likes of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple etc. They could even
start to effectively market direct and try to compete head to head. This is especially
relevant in the digital market, where their ability to innovate and make
changes happen has now doubled and will now be watched closely and followed by
others.

So on balance, it would appear to be a sound move and a
potential sea changer that others will have to follow. Now the betting starts
on who will follow?

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Amazon has
announced a free service that is about making it easy to distribute ebooks to
groups. The immediate question many may ask is ‘so what, groups don’t buy
ebooks’, but they do and today can’t achieve that mass distribution or
broadcast.

‘Whispercast for Kindle,’ will allow
purseholders and stakeholder to buy once and send with one click. Teachers can
send to students not just ebooks but also set up and manage access policies on
school equipment effectively blocking undesirable access. An enterprise could
also benefit for the same controls, but it is schools and that lucrative
education sector that Amazon appear to be focused on today. It effectively
brings Whispernet out of the closet and to the front enabling it to be used to
manage and control estates not just of Kindle ereaders but also Kindle Fire
Tablet.

Amazon report that
Clearwater High School used 2,000 Kindles for over two years and now is using
them in 122 schools within their district. Also a third world education
provider, Worldreader, have been using the technology to deliver over 200,000
e-books to children in sub-Saharan Africa. Amazon claim that the technology is
now being tested widely in hundreds of schools.

So we find
ourselves stepping back to understand how Whispercast could become a real asset
top Amazon and win over not just schools, institutions but commercial
organisations who are all looking for better ways to distribute ‘stuff’. We are
not just talking about books but in principle anything that is supported over
the network. Today we have services such as Dropbox who have made a healthy
business out of doing the same in a cloud. We all have document, PDFs and stuff
cluttering up emails which now are mobile.

Its interesting to
reflect that the Blackberry redefined email by making it mobile, perhaps Amazon
are redefining the document world and broadcasting of digital stuff and don’t
forget they also have the cloud to allow them to do even more. If they do
extend the service to cover Kindle apps running on other devices it certainly
could become a real differentiator and leave some behind.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

If you were in Jeff Bezos shoes would you buy the smartphone chip
business of Texas Instruments (TI) who currently supply them with processors
for their Kindle tablet?

It’s an interesting question and one that Isreali finacial
newspaper Calcalist claims is in advance stages of talks today.

So you start of selling books on the Internet, extend that to
media, open it up to create a marketplace, then to a wide range of other products,
move to become a publisher and deal direct right back to manuscript, launch
your own ereader, move into cloud based services, continue to grow both
organically and by acquisition, into a one stop shopping emporium. The question
is how far do you go technically? Does the ownership of the processor design
give you better integration and lower cost base?

Amazon is becoming harder to define but increasingly focused on
creating that vertical total experience. They start with the products and
service and move to encircle the total experience. Apple on the other hand
start with the device and work back to the product. Which approach makes more
sense and is easier to develop? The two things we are joining together is the
creator and the consumer and Amazon clearly have that chain increasingly covered.
Apple still are consumer and technology bias. Amazon has built an impressive
walled garden but has also enabled others to participate all be it often only
on their terms. Apple remain entrenched in their walled garden.

The other player of interest, is Google and their approach to
building Android and then effectively sub licensing the technology devices
interface to others. Their approach is again different but their vision of
being at the top is the same.

Three different routes three different players.

We don’t envisage seeing Amazon not moving for the likes of TI’s processors.
It makes good sense to own the design through to the delivery and to not merely
knit the technology together. Is Amazon capable of managing such operations –
why not? Will it deflect Amazon – we doubt it.

So will Amazon extend its device range to includes smartphones,
ereaders and tablets – why not?

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, service
providers are allowed ‘safe harbour’ on content posted, but must act on any infringement
notice that is served on them. Pretty straight forward and it is a process that
happens everyday.

However, it can break down and go wrong and in the
case one notice appears to have closed down not one piece of content infringement
but 1.5 million teacher and student blog articles.

Pearson raised a takedown notice on ServerBeach who host Edublogs'
websites. Edublog claims to be the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite
setup on the web. The infringement cited was aimed at a teacher's blog, which in 2007, had shared
a copy of a 1974 Beck’s
Hopelessness Scale's questionaire with his class.

Pearson requested $120 for the 38 year questionnaire, which
was posted in 2007 and ServerBeach contacted Edublogs. The notice sent to Edublogs had apparently already been actioned and the offending post removed and not being displayed. However as many of us know, deleting something doesn’t remove it from the search engines’ cache so it is still effectively there and in this case ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of Edublogs. When Edublogs did not respond within 24 hours to emails alerting it to the allegedly infringing content, ServerBeach shut down the entire site and some 1.5 million innocent blogs. The action over one DMCA notice impacted a whole community. Was this
in fact compliance or over zealous compliance?

There then followed
a open internet spat between ServerBeach and Edublogs.

A whole innocent community of teachers and
students have been effected by something that they should not have been exposed
to. Who was right, wrong and whether it could have been handled better is subjective today. What is clear is that it is a bad day’s PR for DMCA, Pearson, ServerBeach
and Edublogs and a worse day for a significant education community.

How many companies can you
identify that will be taking on 60,000 temporary seasonal staff this year?

We have already written about the
10,000 additional staff Amazon intend to take on in the UK and now it has
announced they will be joined by some 50,000 additional staff in the US! In effect
Amazon will be doubling their workforce over the holiday season and that indicates
the significant sales uplift that they expect that they will have to cope with.
This is in addition to all the sales they make commission on through their
marketplace which are shipped by their partners. It also excludes all the
devices sales done by resellers.

If Amazon is confident of this
level of turnover who are going to be the causalities? Which retailers are
going to have a bleaker Christmas than they expected?

Amazon does not just ship books,
CDs, Videos, games, but the emporium sells nearly everything and the kitchen
sink. However, we must note their claims that their digital business is now
more in some sectors than its physical counterparts. Digital sales need no
extra staff and in fact need fewer staff so it begs the question how much
physical business they expect to mop up this year. 60,000 temporary staff would
indicate a lot!

Microsoft have now produced aDigits prototype with
the aim of creating a mobile device that enables its owner to control a range
of equipment through hand gestures. Digits is designed to be the next
generation of the sensor gloves but leaves a big question as to whether its
design is still to cumbersome and unattractive to capture the imagination of
the consumers.

However, some experts question whether consumers would want to wear such
a device during their day-to-day activities.

Digits’s camera-based sensor detects infrared light and together
with software constructs a "fully articulated hand skeleton", which by
measuring the distance between fingers a thumbs, can be determine, interpret
and understand what the user's hand is
doing.

They aim to reduce the component parts such that the device could be the
size of a watch, worn constantly and enable users to be able to interact
spontaneously with their devices using simple gestures and not even touch them.
Some of the gestures sound exciting; twisting an imaginary dial to turn up the volume,
playing video games without a console by creating recognised gestures, tapping
fingers on an imaginary smartphone pad to dial a number, closing and opening
documents by clenching and opening your palms.

So will Digits succeed to start to establish Pranev Mistry’s Sixth Sense
world of become another games extension? If it can become device agnostic it
may stand a chance but again will Microsoft tie it too closely to selling their
devices and their operating systems?

We must remember Digits is only a prototype so has a long way to go but
that Pranev Mistry showed us clear direction and better application over two years
ago.

Microsoft continues to seek ways in which to join
the media delivery party. They have tried devices, mobile operating systems, apps,
services and have had one notable success – the Xbox.

The Zune Media service was a flop and discontinued
earlier this year along with the device. Microsoft then went on to help create
Nook Media and before Nook has taken off, we now have the news that Xbox Music
will be available on the Xbox 360 games console this week and available onWindows-based
devices once Windows 8 is released later in the month.

With a database of some 30 million tracks, the Xbox Music
catalogue claims to be larger than even that of Apple's iTunes, which only has a
mere 26 million tracks. But is volume enough when we are talking of a greater
depth of music than even the connoisseur would expect?

However, like Spotify before it, Zune Media will offer a free
version of the service, enabling users to stream music, with adverts appearing
every 15 minutes. This may not be what Xbox users expected but Microsoft have
carried out research which claims that some 60% of Xbox owners time on their
consoles is spent using entertainment services rather than playing video games.
Does this therefore mean that the consoles could become a sort of media tablet
or platform? After all if one has invested in the console why buy another
device to do the same and if that is the case why not use Zune Media for music?

So the Xbox can support Netflix, BBC iPlayer and sports TV network
ESPN and now Zune Media and the obvious question is how this fits with Nook
Media and ebooks?

The challenge, maybe to not
build on the Microsoft brand, but to redefine it cleanly around the Xbox itself.
However, naming the new service after a 'dead duck' is not a good omen on a
service which is clearly about collections that are meant to last even if they
are on-demand. It also begs the strategy direction Microsoft aim to take with Nook Media?

Sunday, October 14, 2012

New services are appearing weekly and all offer to either,
save publishing, or redefine it within the new digital world. This last week
has been no different and has seen three new services gain visibility, drive interest
and create a significant volume of debate amongst the industry thinkers, and advisors.

What is now interesting is that services are being launched
with outside funding and these are not only different, but are potentially very
disruptive in how they challenge the way we do business and interact within the
market.

Are objective today is not to decide the winners and losers
but to explore some of the challenges and their potential to disrupt tomorrow.

Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle create a package of ebooks from different
authors and offer these at a consumer driven price. In other words the consumer
chooses how much they want to pay. If they pay more than the average payment
they can receive additional ebooks and they also get to choose how their money should
be divided. The files themselves are DRM free.

We all remember the famous event when Radiohead did the same
consumer driven pricing for their album release, ‘In Rainbows ‘. Some gave a cent, others paid a responsible
sum, others paid a fee aligned to the standard RRP. It caused a stir, gave
Radiohead loads of publicity and as a one off promotional exercise and
according to who you listened to, worked, or didn’t.

Humble Bundle are doing
the same in other media sectors with their ‘brew’ bundles and now have extended
it to ebooks. The collection on offer featured books by the likes of Cory
Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, etc. The titles offered are mainly backlist
with the exception of one new Tor title.

Some may be forgiven to thinking that the children had
actually taken over the chocolate factory.

The ebook bundle certainly gives new meaning to the term ‘net receipts’
and raises many questions on rights, other renditions and the model’s
sustainability if it were widely adopted.

Cory Doctorow claims combined sales have exceeded $400k.
However how many of the bundle have or will be read and what is the percentage
that is merely there to pad out the bundle to make it look attractive? Are the receipts
spread evenly or do they go to the better known authors and to the detriment of
others?

It certainly is a great promotional way to sell backlist,
and maybe mix in some front list to add spice. It would also work were there is
a clear genre attraction, but is it just another Groupon in the increasingly ‘Voucherclouded’
world? We can only read one book at any point in time and a bundle would
suggest a high percentage will be mere shelf fillers to aid a promotion.

When ebooks are being sold at 97% discount, you can’t blame
Humble Bundle’s for asking , how much?

Oyster

No it’s not the latest swipe card for London Transport, but
a new start up which offers a different sort of a potential ‘pearl’ to
publishing.

It is not the first, nor will it be the last start up to
offer ebooks under subscription. However, it’s well funded and determined to
push the increasingly visible issue of ‘licence versus ownership’ . Oyster claim
to be the new ‘Spotify for ebooks’ and we can’t argue that this make sense and is
long overdue.

However, just as Spotify have found in changing the music
culture, there are many questions and
challenges Oyster now face in its drive to change book culture.

Oyster offer a ‘much
as you can eat’ for a straight monthly subscription. This makes good sense but
we are all constrained by time and they are highly unlikely to have the field
to themselves.

The subscription has
to offer a true value statement and match or compete with the current high
discount offers in the market. This is becoming increasingly difficult as some
front sellers are being discounted at ridiculous levels such as 97%. The
traditional retailers can easily undermine the Oyster offer by heavy discounting
on the leading titles and Oyster’s ability to respond may be somewhat limited.

The next challenge is on range. If Oyster offer the full
range, then how will they be seen as different and what compelling reason will the
consumer have to tie themselves into a contract as opposed to playing the
market? They could ‘twig’ content and feed vertical niches, but as readers are
eclectic in their habit, they will fall into the hole the big book clubs did
before them.

They could align with vertical interest groups, but today they have
not said this is a route they are planning to take.

Then we have the commercial model and rights whether these
sales fall under business as usual, subsidiary sales, or whatever. Asking publishers
to revisit contracts can be a big negative and roadblock to getting content.
Therefore publishers need to be able to square the subscription model against their
existing contracts.

The subscription model is logical in a licenced environment
but changing culture is not easy and the digital market has a reputation in
being somewhat fickle even if there may be a pearl in the oyster.

Bookshout

Finally we come to what may be the most contentious of the
start-ups, Bookshout. The new operation is attempting to aggregate readers
ebook libraries, by what some may described as the back door.

A member gives Bookshout their Amazon, Nook and whatever logon
details and allows Bookshout to use
these to effectively log on and verify their purchased ebooks. Bookshout then sets
up copies of these ebooks on their service, enabling the reader to be
effectively device and retailer independent. The new copy is provided by the
publisher on the basis that Bookshout has established proof of previous
purchase. Bookshout can not only consolidate a reader’s library onto their
platform, they can also consolidate reading information and activity
information and feed this back to publishers.

Obviously, Bookshout retails ebooks in their own right too.

Questions remain as to what DRM they are using and how what
is effectively therefore a fresh licence can square with the like of the lack
of a first sale doctrine on media today. The publishers appear happy , BookShout
are happy, but how long before Amazon and Nook shut the back door? It somewhat
like making a business on stealing someone else’s sale and expecting them to
roll over.

Who does the customer have a contract with?

Obviously, their unique proposition is based on the member being
willing to give them their personal access credentials and that the publishers
accept that they have established proof of purchase of the original licence.
Most importantly it is also based on them being able to operate, within what
some may say, is a loophole in Amazon’s and Nook’s terms both with publishers
and their consumers.

So is Bookshout the reading platform for all? Will it be the
place of choice or merely somewhere one goes to aggregate their library? It may
depend on how many people have ebooks from both Amazon and Nook which no one
today can really answer but is a big question on which to build a business.

The interesting thing is that all three if successful are
disruptive, but how do we measure success and is it sustainable or merely a
flash of first mover excitement?

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Waterstones have proudly unveiled a number of key branding
messages aimed at establishing their bookselling credentials on the High Street. Today
they took a whole page colour advert in the Saturday Daily Telegraph main paper
to promote one of their new brand messages,

‘Even the most ardent reader will never reach the end of a
good bookshop.’

The page features a collage of some 36 x 36 book jackets
(1296) clearly demonstrating the range on offer and with the new message
plastered over them.

The doyen of bookselling, Fred Bass of the Strand in New
York proudly claims 18 miles of books and range is something all booksellers
are proud of. Sadly Waterstones can’t manage 1296 books without having to
resort to duplicating many of the books in the collage. Some are repeated not
once but up to 5 times and that is only on those that are visible behind the
branding headline!

Perhaps there is a subliminal case of product placement in
play. Perhaps the publishers have to pay to get their jackets on the page and
some could not resist a multi-buy option.

We could have a great competition identifying the repeats
and like some deliberate mistake game see who gets the most placements and
which book scores the most repeats. Simon Cowell, Bruno, JK Rowling and others
all seem to be featured 4 or 5 times alone!

The devil is always in the detail and although we had great
fun circling the repeats it could be seen by some as an insult to readers who
may quickly ‘reach the end of a good bookshop.’

Saturday, October 06, 2012

We have seen the significant legal bills that publishing is now having
to stomach and now more often than not are pitted against organisations with significant
‘war chests’ and deep pockets. However these pale into chump change when you
look at the patent battles between the technology giants.

Samsung Galaxy family of smartphones and tablets are now a serious
threat to Apple they are starting to gain a quiet momentum to dominate the
market. Remember RIM (Blackberry), Nokia, Sony Ericson, HTC? They have all
challenged but in the end failed to deliver that extra piece and take the market.
Now Samsung is everywhere and you only have to look over your shoulder on the
train, the underground to see Samsung devices and the company now expects to
deliver operating profits of 8.1 trillion won ($7.3bn; £4.5bn), which is nearly
double last year's figure and beating analyst expectations and sending Samsung
shares 1.5% higher.

But with success comes the legal battles and costs and it is not all
plain sailing for Samsung and the increasingly acrimonious patent battles with
Apple continue and are escalating. Some are now starting to question the
effectiveness or appropriateness on some patent laws especially in the US.

We have had the rejection of Apple claims in some countries and the notably
victory on home turf in California. Samsung to be fair also has won patent
cases on its home turf of South Korea. Samsung have now added Apple's latest
handset to a US patent lawsuit claiming the iPhone 5 infringes eight of its
technologies. These include features to synchronise
photos, music and video files across several devices, and a method
tocapture and send
video over the internet. There are also ‘Frand patents’, which refer
to technologies Samsung has an obligation to licence on "fair, reasonable
and non-discriminatory" terms as these are regarded as essential to data
transmission standards. The other six disputed innovations are feature patents,
and in theory Samsung could force Apple's products off the shelves if it does
not remove the functions from the devices.

We have potential huge fines and moves to remove devices from the market
on both sides of the fence and with Samsung owning some 30,000 US patents it is
easy to see this is going to get very legal and costly for everyone. Judge
Richard Posner who presided and subsequently threw out a case involving Motorola
and Apple in June, has posted a blog calling for an overhaul of the
law regarding software patents.

"Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams
of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral - most software
innovations are quickly superseded." he wrote.

"Software innovation tends to be piecemeal - not entire devices,
but components, so that a software device (a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop,
etc) may have tens of thousands of separate components (bits of software code
or bits of hardware), each one arguably patentable.”

He advocates that the 20-year-long patent protection that is sensible
for pharmaceutical drugs do not apply to software.

Irrespective we now have a further twist in the notorious Californian $1bn
patent dispute which Samsung lost on Apple’s home turf earlier this year.
Samsung are now claiming that the jury foreman in the original trial did not
fully declare his interests so engaging in a serious misconduct that prejudiced
the verdict. It is claimed that jury foreman Velvin Hogan "failed to
answer truthfully" on information about his past involvements in lawsuits,
had a grievance against Seagate over a breach of contract he lost and led to
his bankruptcy some six months later, (Samsung are Seagate’s largest
shareholder), had a grievance against the law firm Quinn Emmanuel which s the
same firm in both cases. Samsung have also raised points on interviews, given
by Hogan where he admitted giving instructions to other members of the jury on
matters of patent law based on his own experience – instructions that Samsung contest.
It all sounds like a plot from a John Grisham novel. Judge Koh has now to rule
on the various issues and motions related to the case.

‘When two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score ‘
Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Friday, October 05, 2012

Seven years is a long time in this digital age and much has
happened since Google first attempted to land grab all the content, adopt the
orphans and hoodwink the industry. Seven years of litigation, seven years of
fat legal expenses and seven years which on reflection were sometimes sad as
positions were taken and sometimes it appeared the industry was hell bent on a
programme of civil war. It was somewhat inevitable it would be settled ‘out of
court’ and behind those now richer lawyers’ doors and yesterday the Association
of American Publishers (AAP) and Google announced a settlement agreement and the
dismissal of their lawsuit.

The Authors Guild fights on and no doubt we may hear of a similar
settlement in the future.

We don’t know the details of what has been agreed other than the
high level statements which say much, but as ever are open to much
interpretation. What is clear is that although the simpler and less contentious
case of the publishers is resolved, the core issue of orphans remains unresolved
and somewhat on the table. The settlement would appear to remain an ‘opt out’
not an ‘opt in’ model which is a clear win for Google and it is somewhat unclear
what the terms are.

The question remains; who owns what and whether digital rights of
books digitised by Google under its programme are actually all owned by the
publishers, or assumed to be owned and aligned to the print rendition?

There is no mention of the rights registry, so the one positive
the old settlement would have delivered appears to have disappeared with the
will to continue the fight.

Following the agency debacle, this would appear to be the second
attempt to derail Amazon that has expensively gone wrong. It would lead some to
question the cost of litigation incurred and what has been achieved in return?

Thursday, October 04, 2012

Amazon is not just a books, music, video, games and
media retailer, it is the major online 'one stop shop' for many and one that has a cross
merchandise offer that is very powerful and even threatens the likes of Walmart. If
we take the latest UK news that they are increasing their take on of temporary UK staff
for the Christmas run-up from 3,000 to 10,000 short-term packaging jobs in just
three weeks, we see not only their commitment, but also their decisiveness to do
business. How many retailers can you name who are taking on such numbers? Some 2,000
of the workers will also retain their roles after Christmas and join Amazon’s growing 56,000 full-time worldwide workforce.

Amazon have also just announced
that,Amazon Studios, hasoptioned its first novel, the
Amazon-published, Southern horror 'Seed'. The book is a Southern gothic
suspense tale of an "ordinary man with a demon on his back." It was authored by Ania Ahlborn, under Amazon’s sci-fi, fantasy and
horror imprint, 47North. The book is a self-published and a viral driven Amazon ebook bestseller. By developing Amazon Studios Amazon is
now becoming a content developer with multiple channels to develop, promote and
exploit content. This offers authors something that is truly unparalleled within
the media market and could further fuel author deals that others will not be
able to match.

Amazon Studios already claims to have optioned 10,000
movie scripts and 1,800 series pilot scripts, and although this number will reduce to a mere
handful of projects such as 'Seed', the process and momentum is there for all to aspire to.

But Amazon's growth is not just driven internally and by themselves. Marketplace is further fuelling its 'one stop
shop' environment and building on the realisation that books are books, be they
new, old or used and being able to compare and buy from within one trusted store offers
more than any simple comparison sight. Again Amazon have thought out consumer
behaviour and matched their service to fit it. Many now have feed their
catalogues into Amazon’s marketplace and are happy to get new sales and pay a
commission on price paid and the postage incurred. This is without the many 'agents' who simply refer their sales to Amazon to fulfil.

Amazon’s growth is also being
fuelled by the likes of Pogoplug who have launched an Amazon-powered cloud
backup service in the US and UK. Pogoplug allows users to stream photos, music
or video from their home computer to wherever they are in the world. Pogoplug
mobile is a new device that allows users to access unlimited media streams from
their mobile device using Amazon’s new budget cloud Glacier service for offering users low price
fast cloud storage with prices around £19.99 a year for 100GB of offsite
storage. Building a further trusted layer to many consumer relationships.

As Amazon continue
their path to dominate many markets, they do have another side to their business
face. They are giving back to one community around its fulfilment centre in
Spartanburg, US by donating some 40 Kindles to the local School for the Deaf
and the Blind. The students will also received $2,500 in gift cards to download
resources to the new devices. The Kindles have a number of disabled-friendly features
such as text-to-speech and large print and thereby obviate the need for visually
impaired students to have wait for the audio book or large print edition.

Amazon is developing and
creating its own ecosystem which is fuelling growth and is the only giant who
not only understands the consumer but marries technology, media, retail and a
thriving marketplace under one roof.

As the roles across the value chain of the various
publishing sectors change we find ourselves asking, how much does it cost to acquire
a new customer, to retain them and to do business with them in an environment
where prices remain at best unstable and at worst are falling?

In the old world costs are fairly well defined, but in the new world these become far more complex and all tend to add small increments to the overall cost of doing business

Who should do what, and spend what to promote what, is an interesting challenge with authors, publishers,
retailers all trying to be the communications hub with their consumers? The buzz word today is 'discoverability' and how we can all channel our resources (money and effort) to making it work.

Google, Twitter, Facebook all are about advertising and maximising
their opportunity for businesses to pay to be see over the crowd. If you want
to be seen at the top of the search then search optimisation is a key and money
is the answer. If you want your tweets to resonate then again money is the
answer and now Facebook is to join the game which gives you details on how many
people have viewed what has been written.

Anything that gets searches, tweets and events and posts ‘seen’ is fair
game and with it obviously comes an army of helpers to enable businesses to exploit
these facilities at an additional cost. Facebook now plan is to introduce their new post service in the US and has begun tests in New Zealand. The cost is thought to be
$7 a post and obviously could raise significant revenues
for the social giant.

What is clearly now starting to appear is a whole series of new toll boths and
additional cost options to doing business on the internet, or as some would
suggest – doing business. Social and Search giants are not alone in creating
new additional and compelling charges , the banks, insurance and other
financial institutions have done it for years. The questions are now whether the market can sustain the overall costs, who should respond
and how and who should channel their resources elsewhere?

It is after all easy to spend money but often much harder, or increasingly harder, to make it>

About Me

Before entering publishing I worked for many years as a Senior Executive in blue chip organisations in the retail, oil and automotive sectors. My publishing induction was initially as Director of Strategic Development at VISTA. There I was responsible for, and a contributor to, their highly acclaimed ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ research series, the primary creator behind publishing services PubEasy and ‘batch.co.uk’, the initiator of the development of new Front Office systems to support publishers. In 2006 I joined Value Chain International(VCIL) initially as VP Marketing, Media and Publishing before becoming their President in 2009. In July 2011 the company's operations were acquired by Syncordia. I hold two non executive positions with publishing industry players Bibliophile Ltd and Haven Group and currently setting up Read Petite a service focused on providing digital short form material online via subscription.
Email mdaniels@opus57.co.uk